The Milwaukee Brewers are on an unprecedented run of success, recently locking up their fourth consecutive National League Central Division title and compiling a franchise record of 103 wins this season, the best record in the 2026 Major League season. Fans have packed American Family Field throughout the year, with regular-season attendance climbing to nearly 2.8 million. With 25 sellout games, including six in a row to end the season, Milwaukee’s dedicated fan base showed out for Major League’s smallest market.
Yet, the Brewers have long been looking to make an even deeper connection with fans, choosing a public mural program that launched about three years ago as the vehicle to attain that goal. What began as a local endeavor spread far and wide across the state.
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The murals are distinctly diverse and capture aspects of life throughout Wisconsin – a Milwaukee paletero on a Walker’s Point building; messages on the façade of a coffee shop and indoor play space in Wauwatosa; a collection of unique local images on the side of a popular bar in Eau Claire; ballpark spectators, dressed in Brewers colors, rising from their seats in unison in a community park in Fitchburg; a pickup baseball game at sunset in a woodland clearing painted on a storage building in Janesville; iconic Brewers Barrelman enjoying a day of fishing on the side of an industrial building in Green Bay; and an anime-inspired mural of Brewers catcher William Contreras in the East Side’s Black Cat Alley.
After some fits and starts, the community mural program formally launched in 2024 when the Brewers reached out to local artist Michael Cerda to design a 100-foot-long mural on an outside wall of Heavy Hitters Athletic Facility (415 S. Third St.) in Walker’s Point, a neighborhood with a large Latino population located a short distance from the ballpark. The Brewers’ roster features several Latino players, including Jackson Chourio, William Contreras, Luis Lara, Abner Uribe, Gary Sánchez, Joey Ortiz and Antonio Senzatela.
Cerda, born to immigrant parents from Mexico and raised on Milwaukee’s South Side, said he was given artistic freedom by the Brewers to choose the focus of the mural. He decided on an image of a paletero, a vendor who sells paletas, traditional Mexican ice pops, from bell chime-equipped pushcarts.
“I’ve been going to Brewers games since I was a kid,” said Cerda. “My dad always thought I’d end up playing baseball in the stadium but with the way my life played out, I ended up doing artwork for the Brewers instead, it means a lot.”
Painting a paletero, who wears a cap with a Brewers logo, allowed Cerda to tell a story centered on his childhood.
“The paletero is a core memory, I grew up chasing those guys down with what little money I had,” he remarked.
A paletero is also the focus of a South Side mural created by Aisha Valentín and Whitney Salgado in partnership with Luna Creative Collaborations, displayed on the side wall of Paleteria Yayo, a Mexican-style ice cream and popsicle shop (1727 W. Lincoln Ave.) The mural, which celebrates Latin culture, depicts a paletero selling sweet frozen treats to kids, with American Family Field in the background.
The Brewers also chose Cerda to paint a City Connect-inspired mural on an exterior wall of Slingshot Bar in West Allis (6325 W. National Ave.) that tied in with the Brewers unveiling of their “Wisco Way” uniforms earlier this season that celebrate the natural beauty and culture of Wisconsin.
This summer also saw the creation of several other murals in Milwaukee, and across the state.
In July, artist Jenna Wood completed a City Connect-inspired community mural on the side of The Pickle, a popular bar on Water Street in downtown Eau Claire in west-central Wisconsin.
The mural is part of the Brewers Pop-Up Series, which aims to show the shared connection statewide fans have with the Brewers and was unveiled at the start of the Eaux Claires Music Festival. Indie folk singer-songwriter and festival founder Justin Vernon, an Eau Claire native and frontman of the Grammy Award-winning band Bon Iver, was an early supporter of the City Connect campaign and was instrumental in bringing the mural project to Eau Claire.
“Sometimes it’s scary, but I enjoy that people can see the whole process and what goes into doing a large-scale mural,” Wood said. “I also enjoy just putting something out there for people to come and enjoy, make memories and take pictures; I love that I’m able to just leave a bit of my art out there for years to come, hopefully.”
The Wisco-branded mural highlights aspects of life in Eau Claire, such as music, arts, nature, kayaking and, of course, kubb, a lawn game in which wooden batons are thrown to knock over wooden blocks.
“Eau Claire is the kubb capital,” said Wood, who resides in nearby Menomonee. “It’s very popular.”
Baseball is also highlighted in the mural, given Eau Claire’s history and ties to the sport, Wood added. Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who played for the Milwaukee Braves and ended his career with the Brewers, began his professional career in 1952 at age 18 playing for the Eau Claire Bears, a Minor League team whose home field was historic Carson Stadium.
“The mural ties it all together,” said Wood, whose father, Lynn Johnson, was at her side nearly every day as she worked on the project.
Given Eau Claire’s proximity to the Minnesota border, Wood, who counts outfielder Geoff Jenkins as her all-time favorite Milwaukee player, is hopeful that the mural will help boost the Brewers fandom in the area.
“Murals are an effective way of getting a message across and making key connections with various communities,” said Izzy Lugo, who leads the Brewers experiential marketing initiatives. “We don’t need another billboard, and this is art, right? So essentially, we’re allowing for as much creative control from the artist as possible and allowing them to reimagine our brand in ways that we have never seen before,” he said.
The community mural concept first arose within the Brewers organization in 2019, shortly after Sharon McNally took over as vice president of marketing for the team.
“I started looking into how we could better engage with the communities immediately around the ballpark in the city of Milwaukee,” said McNally. “All fans are important to us but we know there is some interest, baseball passion certainly, but maybe not as much fan engagement with the communities that are right here in our city and we wanted to do more and we wanted to do better, so we started looking at murals.”
However, the program was stalled.
“First COVID happened in 2020 and that put everything on a back burner,” said McNally. “In 2021, for part of the season we only had limited attendance and our hands were full with restarting baseball.”
In 2023, the Brewers once again began to take a closer, more serious look at a community mural program.
“At that time, we were looking at various agencies that work with organizations such as ours to assist in identifying a building, securing that space, finding an artist, making a call for entries, getting it designed, then getting it installed. But none of that gave us the authenticity and the longevity that we were looking for in this program.”
Once again, the program was put on ice until Lugo came on board.
“Izzy is personally passionate about baseball and he’s highly networked and very connected throughout the community in music, fashion, retail, art and with influencers,” McNally said. “He was the perfect guy, he connected with various artists that were representative of the communities we wanted to put the art in.”
The goal of the community mural program came into focus.
“We wanted things that were authentic. We wanted to go into communities and be a contributor and not a taker,” McNally said. “We wanted to go in and say we love our city and everybody in it. We want to make everybody feel like they are part of these amazing post-season runs (the Brewers have played in the post-season eight of the last nine years). The value of sports is the way it brings communities together and unifies people through a common positive passion. It’s the true beauty of sports.”
It wasn’t long before the colorful murals began sprouting up across the Milwaukee area.
In 2024, artist Whitney Nettles created a baseball-themed mural called “Field of Play” on the east wall of Little Village Play Café, a coffee shop and indoor play place for kids and families in Wauwatosa.
“The Brewers were very open to artist interpretation; they didn’t really have any parameters other than including their colors and making sure that it was clearly a baseball mural,” Nettles said. “Outside of that, I had free reign.”
Nettles, who also helped create The Little Village Play Café’s branding when it opened its doors in March 2023, describes her style as “very bold and graphic.”
“When I designed the branding for the Little Village, its main logos were contained within these pennant-shaped flags, because what is more baseball than a pennant? This is perfect, I thought, and ties together well with messages of teamwork, togetherness and community,” Nettles remarked. “Baseball is such a uniter, in general, and since the café is geared toward kids and bringing the community together, I feel like the story wrote itself.”
The Janesville mural, created by Madison-based artist Emily Balsley and located at the Janesville Youth Sports Complex, is part of a growing emphasis on public art in the community.
“The Brewers are a beloved part of Wisconsin culture, and this mural is a fun way to bring that statewide connection right here to Janesville while creating a vibrant new piece of public art,” said Christine Rebout, executive director of the Janesville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The Brewers have also supported the creation of two other significant murals in Milwaukee that are technically outside the formal scope of their community mural program. One is a massive mural of Brewers’ broadcasting legend Bob Uecker on the north façade of the Wintrust Financial Center (731 N. Jackson St.) commissioned by the ownership group of Wintrust Financial Center, with support from The Westin Milwaukee, We Energies Foundation, Milwaukee Downtown BID #21 and Visit Milwaukee.
The other is a mural celebrating Aaron’s enduring legacy that adorns the Clinton Rose Senior Center (3045 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Dr.) on the North Side.
“We’re always trying to think of the community and the neighborhood first and what image there makes the most sense and would have the most meaning,” McNally said.
